For all his modesty, he's still his father's son

July 12 2003By Fiona Capp

My father, SandyNicholas Wollaston
Short Books,$39.95

The world of Sandy Wollaston, a British explorer and naturalist who was part of the first expedition to Mount Everest with Mallory, and who endured extraordinary hardship in the jungles of New Guinea in the vain hope of climbing a distant peak, now seems a remote one.

In these post-colonial times, such an explorer is a bit like one of the specimens or exotic artefacts he brought back from distant lands.

For most of us, he is a curiosity; too closely aligned with the ambitions and assumptions of empire to be celebrated without reservation.

If you happen to be the son of such a man, however, the story is a very different one. And if you were only four years old when your father died, the story you can tell is inevitably a wistful one, an act of imagination as much as a reconstruction of a life. ");document.write("

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And if the circumstances of your father's death were sensational and tragic, your story of him is inescapably determined by his death as much as his life.

Unlike many contemporary biographies, My Father, Sandy is not a confessional narrative about how such events reverberate through subsequent generations. While it is a quest of sorts, it is much more restrained, haunting and subtle than the popular "my search for my dad" variety. There is no Oedipal attempt by the author - himself a respected British novelist - to upstage his father. The focus is kept squarely on the fascinating but elusive spectre of "the father I never had".

Nicholas Wollaston's greatest frustration in this quest is his father's self-containment, his reticence. His eloquent diaries revealed him to be a man of his time and class - "phlegmatic, prejudiced, reluctant to give much away". The eulogies written about Sandy Wollaston after his death celebrated his courage, staunch friendship, his ease with people from all walks of life, his humour. But for his son, they failed to bring to life the fallible human being.

The story begins with Nicholas's few memories of his father. There are occasional reflections on his delight in meeting people who could tell him about his father and elegiac asides on how "all my life I have missed his future and his part in mine". But the bulk of My Father, Sandy is about Sandy Wollaston's extraordinary passion for "the Beyond".

His early adventures as a naturalist involved collecting bugs and other creatures in the Sudan for the millionaire collector Charles Rothschild. He cut his teeth as an explorer in the Ruwenzori mountains on the borders of Uganda and the Belgian Congo, and then fell under the spell of the unexplored Nassau mountains in New Guinea. After discovering a rare alpine flower - now named Primula wollastonii - during the first expedition to Mount Everest, Sandy fell in love with a woman called Mary Meinertzhagen, who was as adventurous as he was. They spent their honeymoon in the rugged wilderness of Colombia and then settled in the Cotswolds, where they spent four blissful years.

During this time, Nicholas was born. Then John Maynard Keynes invited Sandy to live in Cambridge and be a college tutor. It was an invitation that was to have repercussions no one could have foreseen. A few weeks before Nicholas's fourth birthday, an unhinged student who had taken to a life of crime sought out Sandy in his rooms at Cambridge. When a detective who had been pursuing the student made an entrance, the student shot both men and then turned the gun on himself.

Nicholas recounts this final, bizarre chapter of his father's life dispassionately. The emotional shock of the story only fully hits home when he tells how his mother came out of a gallery in London to see the headline across the evening paper - "Undergraduate shoots tutor dead: Amazing drama at Cambridge".

When I first met the 70-year-old Nick Wollaston at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for Artists, in Ireland, it was his wry humour and self-deprecation, his reluctance to speak of his achievements as a writer that impressed me. Although he insists that his father is "the man I would never be" and does not explore what qualities he may have inherited from his father, I could not help but be struck, as I read this marvellous book, by how much father and son had in common.

Fiona Capp's That Ocean Feeling will be published by Allen & Unwin in October.